Jack stands there like he's unsure of what to do. The officer who wanted to question me turns to him.
"Sir? Are you Robert Webster?"
Jack rubs his face again and nods. He looks so lost, so confused. Like I feel. He looks from the bedroom back to me, like he's trying to make sure I’m really out of there and away from Nick.
"Tell me what happened," the policeman says, pulling a little notebook from his pocket.
The EMT dabs at my temple and I wince as whatever is on the cotton pad he's using stings. He inspects me closely, shining a tiny pin light in my eye. The other is swollen shut. "You need to go to the hospital now," he says. He motions for someone at the door and a dark skinned EMT pushes a stretcher through the tangle of people who've accumulated in my cramped living room.
"Do you think you can stand?" the darker skinned EMT asks.
I nod, not really sure if I can or not. I grip the sheet and try to get to my feet, but my legs are like jelly and quickly give out. Jack rushes to me and catches me before I fall. The EMT with the stretcher pushes it in front of me and he and Jack lift me onto it. My entire body is shaking from exhaustion and pain. Jack takes my hand.
"Get another stretcher in here," an officer calls out from my bedroom. I strain to try and see what's happening, but my neck won't cooperate. Jack kisses my hand and I touch his busted up knuckles.
"I love you," Jack says.
I nod as the fog of unconsciousness starts to creep in and now that I'm safe, I can't fight it anymore. I close my eyes, the image of Jack's strained face is the last thing I see.
Chapter 15
I've never been as tired as I am right now. Or as emotionally drained. The hospital room is quiet except for the beeping of Carly's heart monitor. She's been out for eighteen hours.
I rub her fingers, my own hand bandaged with heavy white gauze. Her face is swollen down the right side; her mouth is almost twice the size it should be. A big white bandage covers the eleven stitches she needed to close the wound on her head and her swollen eye.
Nick has major head trauma as well as a broken nose, but that's not enough. I wanted to kill him, to rip his head right off.
Claire peeks around the edge of the door before coming in with a big vase of sunflowers. Her eyes are red and she looks terrified.
"Hey," I say, concentrating on Carly's sleeping body.
"How is she?" she asks, placing the flowers on a table by the window. She puts her purse in the other chair and sits down.
"Same as this morning," I mutter. "She did squeeze my hand earlier, though."
"That's a good sign," she says. Claire's eyes fill up and she lets the tears fall.
I turn to her and shake my head. "I should've been with her, I should've stopped him."
"Jack," she says, standing and coming over to me. She reaches out and touches my arm. "There's no way anyone could've known Nick would do this. There was nothing we could've done. Without you, he would've done a lot worse." She pats my shoulder and then pulls me into a loose hug.
"Hey," Carly croaks, "let go of my man."
We both jerk toward her at the sound of her voice. Claire rushes to the other side of the bed and takes her other hand.
"Oh, Carly," she coos, kissing her hand. She lets out a sob and holds Carly’s hand to her chest.
"Hey doll," I say, fighting back tears. "We've missed you."
Carly squeezes my hand. "Water," she asks.
I take the cup from her hospital table and hold the straw to her lips. She tries to sip, but her swollen lips make it difficult. She lies back on the pillow and closes her eye.
"My head is killing me," she whispers.
"Want me to get the nurse?" Claire asks. Carly nods and Claire leaves the room.
"Jack," Carly says once we're alone.
"I'm here, baby," I say, leaning close to her so she can see me clearly with her unbandaged eye.
"Is Nick here, in the hospital?" she asks.
"Yeah, he's here. On a different floor with a police guard."
"Is he conscious?"
"No," I say. "He's not."
"But he's alive?"
"Yeah, he's alive." I clench my teeth. "Not that he should be."
Carly reaches up and feels the bandage on her head. "What's the damage?"
I take a deep breath. "You've got a concussion, a hairline fracture in your eye socket, a cracked rib and some bruising pretty much all over."
She swallows hard and my heart breaks for the millionth time today.
"How's he?" she asks.
"Let's just say he's a lot worse, but not as bad as he should be."
"I'm so glad you made it," she says, her voice cracking.
I have to look away from the pain and fear that’s clear in her face. I know there was no way to know what he'd do, but I hate myself for not being able to prevent it.
"I fought him, Jack. I tried so hard," she gulps and a tear slips down her face.
"Shh," I say, wiping away her tear with my thumb. "I know you did, little pistol." I kiss her cheek as gently as I can; it's the only part of her face that isn't bruised.
Claire and the nurse enter the room and I move to the side so the nurse can adjust something on Carly's IV. Carly stares at me, begging me not to leave.
Claire stands in the corner and stares at Carly.
"Thank you," she tells the nurse. Claire slowly comes back to Carly's side and takes her hand again.
"How's your head now?" she asks, petting at her hand.
"Better," Carly says.
Claire continues to let her eyes pass over Carly's battered face. I wish she'd stop doing it.
"I guess I look like shit," Carly says, attempting a chuckle.
"You'll get better, you'll heal," Claire tells her.
Carly lifts the blanket weakly and looks at her legs. Bruises crisscross her shins and her knees are covered in the splotchy marks of carpet burn.
"Damn, he kicked me hard," she says.
Claire puts her hand to her mouth and fights back tears again. I tighten my fists and then turn to look out the window. The snow is piled up high and still falling.
The nurse comes back into the room followed by a tall man in a suit. We've already met.
"Miss Moore," he says. "I'm Detective Stewart. Are you up to talking?"
Carly reaches for my hand and I come back and take hers.
"Yeah, I think so," she says.
He pulls out the same notebook he used with me earlier and licks the tip of his pen.
I listen as Carly retells everything that happened to her, some parts clearer than others. The beast in me that wanted to kill Nick now wants to crush him underneath the heaviest jail cell there is. Carly looks at me as she recalls certain parts and I see inexplicable shame in her face for me to hear this. The officer scribbles on his pad and then closes it when Carly finishes her story.
"Well, we had the hospital run a tox screen on both of you when you came in," he says. I immediately want to ask why they'd run one on Carly, but I've seen enough cop shows to know they had to. "Turns out, Mr. Anderson had large quantities of," he flips the notebook open and lifts a few pages of his notes, "Rohypnol and cocaine in his system as well as a blood alcohol level of .14 percent."
"I had no clue he was using drugs," Carly says quietly.
"We honestly don’t know how he was able to stand, let alone do what he did to you,” Detective Stewart says. “The officers on scene searched his vehicle and found several packages of Rohypnol in his glove box. We've interviewed some of his friends and turns out, he was selling it at a local nightclub," he thumbs through the notes again, "called Riders."
"My friend Allie was roofied there, and again last year at a frat party." Carly's face would be pale if it weren't so bruised.
Detective Stewart makes note of this and then tucks his notebook in his coat pocket.
"I think that'll be all for now, Miss Moore. Get some rest and don't worry, Mr. Anderson won't be able to hurt you again."
"Thank you," Carly says. She pulls me by the hand and holds on to me. Detective Stewart nods at me and then leaves Carly's room.
"Oh, Carly," Claire sighs, leaning over her again. She smoothes the hair on the side of Carly’s head that isn’t bandaged. "You try to sleep," she says, stroking the side of Carly's face. "I'll be back to check on you in the morning." She kisses Carly's cheek and then squeezes her hand. She grabs her purse and then lets her hand rest on my arm before disappearing around the corner.
I pull up a chair and sit next to Carly's bed.
"I'm gonna go to sleep now," she mutters.
"Okay, baby. I'll be here when you wake up."
She attempts to nod before finally slipping under.
Chapter 16
I pull on my coat and hat, not wanting to be home a second longer than it takes to shower and take care of the house. It's the first time I've left her for more than a couple of hours, but she insisted I come home and get some sleep.
She’s been at the hospital for six days and I’ve been by her side the entire time. Nick hasn't regained consciousness, but Detective Stewart is keeping us updated. I lie in that uncomfortable hospital chair every night and think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t stopped hitting him. I catch myself thinking about walking to his hospital room and finishing the job. My hand is still bruised, but it’s no longer as tender as it was and the skin on my busted knuckles has started to heal.
I sort through a stack of mail in the basket on the counter before I go, but I can’t pay any attention to the names. Mom brought it when she came by the hospital yesterday. She wanted to stay and take care of Carly, but I know what Carly needs is not to have to talk about it, not to have to think about it. I toss the mail back on the bar and grab my keys.
I drive toward the hospital, anxious to get back to her, make sure she's safe. I’ve been unable to sleep without her next to me. She’s a part of me, a part that'll need time to heal, but a part of me nonetheless and I feel so incomplete without her.
The elevator is crowded and I try to disappear in the corner. I avoid making eye contact. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, especially about why I’m here. The story about Nick’s attack on Carly made the front page of the paper on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, but thankfully, the only pictures printed were Nick and his father’s. A prominent prosecuting attorney’s son turned drug dealer turned violent rapist will give the people in town something to talk about for weeks.
The little bell dings and the doors slide open smoothly. People trickle out on each floor and I wait impatiently until I get to Carly. A slender woman with sandy blonde hair keeps staring at me, then at my bruised and battered hand.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Depends on what you mean by him,” I say gruffly.
“The man who put my son in a coma,” she says. She turns her face to me and I can see the resemblance to Nick’s picture in the paper.
“I suppose I am him, then,” I say. Another person gets off the elevator and I feel like I’m suffocating.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?” she sniffs. I watch as she wipes tears from her face.
“No, ma’am, I don’t. He got what he deserved.”
She lets out a strangled moan and then puts her hand to her chest. “You heartless bastard,” she sobs.
I turn to face her, my own anger bouncing inside my skull. “You wanna see heartless?” I say, knowing I won’t be able to stop the torrent of words coming out of my mouth. “You should stop by the room of the girl he attacked. You should see her purple face, the cut on the side of her broken eye socket, her swollen and split open lips. Tell her I’m heartless for stopping him before he did any worse to her.”
Her face is haggard and she stares at me with wide eyes that are full of tears. “That girl? The one Nick had been seeing for a year, behind our backs?” she shakes her head and her jaws wobble a little. “That low-life, beer-slinging trash?” she opens her purse and pulls out a tissue to blot at her eyes. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she set this up, just to hurt Nick.”
“Listen, lady,” I say, stuffing my hands in my pockets to keep from grabbing her shoulders and shaking the hell out of her to wake her up. “Your son showed up, forced his way into her apartment and pulled a knife on her.” She shakes her head, unwilling to listen to anything I’m saying.
“I guess I can see why your boy is as fucked up as he is,” I say harshly as the elevator doors finally part on my floor. I leave the woman in the elevator and hear her curse at me as the doors close behind me.
§
Carly’s sitting up in one of the chairs in her room, her long hair cascading down her shoulders and over the big white patch on her head. She’s wearing a loose-fitting pair of yoga pants and a long sleeve T-shirt.
“Jack!” she says excitedly. She greets me the same way every day; as though she’s been worried I wouldn’t come back.
“Hey, gorgeous,” I say, walking toward the chair. Her face is returning to its normal color, but her lips are still bruised.
“Gorgeous, my ass,” she says. “I finally got to look in the mirror today without this,” she points to the bandage.
I wince.
“See? You grimaced,” she chuckles. “They're just stitches. It’s just bruising. I know it’ll go away.”
“Well this is a turnaround,” I say. Yesterday she’d still been so depressed and emotional.
“I didn’t realize how much I hated being in here,” she says, grabbing her purse from the hospital table. “I wanna go home.”
I sit on her bed and face her in the chair. “I went by last night, cleaned it up a bit. I’m afraid some of your stuff got broken when you,” I point to her head.
“I don’t wanna go there,” she says. “That’s not home to me.”
I search her face and she smiles, her puffy lips pulling at the white tape around the bandage.
“I was gonna tell you that night that I want to live with you. I love you, Jack and I want us to be together, to live together.”
The floor is hard on my knees as I kneel in front of her and put my arms tenderly around her waist. I haven’t really been able to hug her, to hold her. I’m afraid of every gasp or intake of breath she has when I touch her.
“I love you so much,” I whisper.
I want to kiss her hand, but her IV was there and now it’s been replaced by a big wad of gauze and a Band-Aid. I turn it over and kiss her palm and she strokes my face.
“Can we go home now?” she asks.
The eye that isn’t bandaged is so clear and so eager. “Yes, we can go home now.”
CARLY
Chapter 17
I never thought my body could ache as much as it has these past two weeks. I watch from my chair by the window as Jack and Mark carry in boxes from my apartment.
"Here ya go," Claire says, sitting a cup of tea on the table in front of me. I've been home for over a week, but Claire still acts like I'm in the hospital.
"Thanks," I say, blowing the steam from the cup.
"Jack has a beautiful house," she says, looking around the kitchen and into the living room.
"I know," I say, sipping the tea. It warms me to my toes.
"Are you feeling better?" she asks for the thousandth time today.
I let out a heavy breath, the motion causing a strain on my fractured rib, and stare at all the boxes stacked in the kitchen. My head is still tender and my eye sometimes throbs uncontrollably as it heals.
"Yeah, just getting back to normal."
"I can't believe they released your name," Claire says, grabbing the Sunday paper from the table. There's no picture, but my name, as well as Jack's, is somewhere in the paragraphs that make up the third page article about what happened.
"It was bound to happen," I sigh. "I just don't wanna go out and face the world when the world knows only half of what happened from Nick's family's point of view."
"It'll blow ov
er," Claire says, tossing the paper back on the table. "After the trial and everything is done, people will go on to the next thing."
I fiddle with the handle on the cup. "I hope so."
Claire takes a drink from her own cup of tea as Mark opens the door and sits a box down. She jumps from the chair and goes over to scoot it out of the way. Jack follows behind him carrying a stack of blankets. My quilt is folded neatly on top, all evidence of what happened washed clean.
"That's the last of it," Mark says, closing the door behind Jack who's stepping over the box to put the blankets on the counter. He walks over to me and bends down to put a gentle kiss on my mouth. He's so afraid of hurting me that his lips barely touch mine.
"You can kiss me a little harder than that," I mutter.
"Not yet," he says. He strokes my hair a little, careful to stay far away from the right side of my head. I wish everyone would stop acting like I'm some fragile porcelain doll.
"How about dinner?" Claire says.
"Pizza?" I pipe up.
"Whatever you want," both Claire and Jack say at the same time.
I sigh with frustration. "Listen guys, I appreciate how much you care, but you don't have to be so accommodating. I'm fine, really."
Mark puts his arm around Claire's waist and looks at me. "We know, Carls. We just wanna help any way we can."
I stand up and my legs are steady. "It's just bruising. I'm not broken."
Claire sighs heavily. "You're stubborn, that's what you are," she smiles.
"Hell yeah, I am," I nod. The stitches were taken out on Friday, but the side of my head is still tender and even the slightest movement feels weird.
Jack grins and puts his arm around me. "We're just happy you're okay." He kisses in my hair and I smile at him.
"I am okay," I say. What Nick did to me, what happened, is a little hazy in places, but my body is healing quickly and my mind is clear for the most part. The concussion was pretty severe and I'm starting to have a little memory loss of what happened. Luckily, the Detective got it all down. Nick's awake now, according to the paper, but he refuses to talk about that night. He's being released from the hospital and taken into custody tomorrow afternoon.
Save Me (Saved Series, Book One) Page 20